What is EMDR Therapy?

If you are currently in search of a therapist and an effective way of doing therapy with a high success rate, you have probably heard of EMDR. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Although EMDR is currently trending, it is not a new intervention. This method of therapy was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro and has been around since the late 80’s with now an abundance of evidence based research proving its efficacy to help people suffering from various emotional pain.

Before we get to explaining what is EMDR, we should first start by exploring who can benefit from EMDR. You don’t need to have a “special type” of trauma (whatever that is) to experience the positive side effects of EMDR. If there is any trauma impacting your quality of life whether its big or small, it can be addressed with EMDR. Following a negative notable event, if there is a lingering feeling of being stuck or in a never ending pattern, EMDR could be effective in breaking that pattern or pushing through that stuck feeling.  With the appropriately trained EMDR therapist, you can use EMDR to process unresolved trauma. 

So how does it work? What is it? EMDR is supported by what we know about the brain when it is capturing or storing a memory while in survival mode (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn). The premise is when we survive a negative experience or maybe a series of negative experiences, our nervous system is activated to protect us. We typically go into a survival state to protect us from danger. We either gear up to fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

Now after the incident has passed and we feel safe enough, our parasympathetic nervous system is activate to regulate and calm down the system that was previously in an alarmed, dysregulated state. Often, whatever memories you experienced and that were captured by your brain during that time while you were off line and in survival mode, are typically stored in a fragmented, unfinished, unprocessed sort of way. This is the reason, when something triggers a bad memory, we may respond in a dysregulated state because that is how our brain filed that memory with the associated emotions. That memory has not been given the chance to be “properly filed away” with all the adaptive resources you now have to take care of yourself. 

EMDR uses the mechanics of the brain’s bilateral way of communicating across the two cerebral hemisphere to allow the brain a chance to “re-process” or finally process past negative events. The left-right bilateral eye technique, resembles hypnosis but it’s not hypnosis, the bilateral movements is just activating our brains processing system to use the resources you already had before the traumatic event or even after that you weren’t able to access to apply to the traumatic memory. It’s also not hypnosis, because you are not in a trance, you are very much aware of yourself, the therapist, and you are actively participating in bringing up the memory and letting your therapist know what your brain is associating in attempt to process a trauma memory. 

Simply, EMDR directly targets unresolved traumatic memories, through using bilateral eye stimulation to give the brain an opportunity to reprocessed these memories with the goal of resolving it with new resources. 

It is imperative that your therapist do a good history taking prior to starting this type of treatment. It is also important that you feel comfortable with the EMDR therapist you are working with, as you are accessing very vulnerable moments stuck in time and should feel safe and trusting of the person facilitating this treatment. Lastly, you should only be doing this type of treatment with a mental health professional who is licensed and trained in EMDR. 

Happy healing! 

Pwendy Fenelus, LCSW